|
Lucinda Williams wrote several songs about [her boyfriend Frank] Stanford’s death. “Pineola,” an example of what her friend Hobart Taylor calls her documentary songs, is a heartfelt, angry rendition of the thing, more or less as it happened. There isn’t much that was changed -- Pineola for Fayetteville, Sonny for Frank, and a Pentecostal burial instead of a Catholic one. The song describes how Lucinda got the news (“When Daddy told me what happened”); her own flattened response (“I could not speak a single word. No tears streamed down my face. I just sat there on the living-room couch, staring off into space”); and the funeral, where Stanford’s mother stood baffled by the hundreds of strangers who had shown up to mourn her adopted child’s death. The song ends with a refrain about the handful of earth thrown onto the casket. Like several other Lucinda tunes of this time, “Pineola” is in what might be called a country style, reminiscent, say, of Bobbie’s Gentry’s old AM radio favorite “Ode to Billie Joe.” It’s the song that hooked the novelist Annie Proulx, who heard it for the first time on the CD compilation accompanying the Oxford American Southern-music issue, and who described it as “the best alternative country song I’d heard in years.”
“Sweet Old World” is a different kind of song -- more ballad than short story -- and its qualities are at the heart of the difficulty involved in articulating the value of any piece of music, which exists first as something in time, as sound and not as text. The difficulty is compounded with lyrical-seeming songs, if only because one part of their achievement is in language, a language that, once separated from the melody, can look banal. “Sweet Old World,” written in the second person, is addressed to a suicide. Musically, it is characteristic of Williams’s later songs. The more obvious, “pretty” harmonic elements are in the background (those sad, mournful Gurf Morlix licks, echoing the melody, played on guitar and violin), which allows Williams’s voice to stand out up front, full of rough feelings and an abrasive sadness. The lyrics are a list of what the dead man is missing (“See what you lost when you left this world”), and consist of simple images arising out of the things we feel, see, smell: dancing with no shoes, the sensation of being touched by another’s fingertips, the sound of your name called by a beloved, a train at night, the feeling of slipping a ring on your finger, the tingling of being kissed, the act of breathing. But because the song’s images are of the senses it has an intimacy, even a seductive eroticism. This is perfectly understandable, given that it’s being sung to a former lover, but was not something I appreciated until I saw it performed at an outdoor evening concert in Oxford, Mississippi, last year, when the air was swollen from a day of heavy thunderstorms. As a result, the music was rounder-sounding, cushioned, and the notes seemed to linger. There was a crowd of about five thousand crushed into the square. They weren’t restless, exactly, but, having spent a day inside, amid reports that the concert might be cancelled, they had a pent-up attentiveness. The stars were coming out, but there was no breeze, just this heavy stillness, and then this tune, with its hip-rolling beat, which was about a suicide, after all. Slowly, people began dancing, everyone swaying, and hands were holding hips, and hands were slipping down trousers, and boys were kissing girls, and girls were kissing girls, slow, wet, slow-dance kisses, and, over to my left, just above Square Books, a couple were undoing their jeans, and, over on another balcony, just above the bar Proud Larry’s, two women were holding each other so melodically that their embrace was virtually a sexual act. (“The shit we see people doing when we are onstage,” Richard Price tells me later.) That night was the second night with the band for Greg Atticus Finch, a keyboard player who has since been dropped; he still remembers the tune that evening. “’Sweet Old World’,” he said -- in a burst of generosity remarkable for a person who has been banished from a band -- “that song is simply the best ballad ever written. No one could write a better ballad than it. No one has written a better ballad. It just doesn’t get any better.”
Williams began writing both “Sweet Old World” and “Pineola” in 1979, the year after Stanford died. She had to wait thirteen years before they were released.
-- Bill Buford, “Delta Nights,” The New Yorker
“Sweet Old World”
See what you lost when you left this world
This sweet old world
What you lost when you left this world
This sweet old world
The breath from your own lips
The touch of fingertips
A sweet and tender kiss
The sound of a midnight train
Wearing someone’s ring
Someone calling your name
Somebody so warm
Cradled in your arm
Didn’t you think you were worth anything?
Millions of us in love
Promises made good
Your own flesh and blood
Looking for some truth
Dancing with no shoes
The beat, the rhythm, the blues
The pounding of your heart’s drum
Together with another one
Didn’t you think anyone loved you?
See what you lost when you left this world
This sweet old world
What you lost when you left this world
This sweet old world
--Lucinda Williams
|
